The Robeson County Board of Elections dismissed a protest from a Red Springs mayoral candidate who lost by two votes in the election last November.
Duron Burney said 18 absentee ballots cast by residents of Red Springs Assisted Living should be tossed, alleging that employees swayed their voting decisions. He also said some residents were mentally unfit to vote.
The Robeson County Department of Social Services and Disability Rights North Carolina investigated and said they did not find evidence of voter coercion.
Carolina Sumpter is now the mayor-elect, pending an appeal from Burney to the state board of elections. Both served on the town’s board of commissioners before running for mayor. After the local board’s ruling on January 9, Burney told the Border Belt Independent he wanted to speak with his attorney before deciding his next steps.
Sumpter said she was pleased with the board’s ruling. “The burden of proof was not met. I felt that from the beginning. But allowing the process—this is the beauty of democracy, right?”
The county board first heard Burney’s arguments on November 21, when members said they were unclear whether to follow state or federal laws. Under North Carolina statute, it is illegal for anyone except a “voter’s near relative or the voter’s verifiable legal guardian” to help request and fill out an absentee ballot.
But a federal judge ruled in 2022 that, under the Voting Rights Act, anyone except a voter’s employer or union representative can help them vote. The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit that Disability Rights North Carolina filed against the state board of elections.
Both state and federal law say mental fitness doesn’t preclude someone from voting.
The state elections board on December 17 returned the case to the Robeson County board for additional fact-finding, advising members to follow the federal law cited in the lawsuit.
Hart Miles, a lawyer representing Burney, presented additional evidence to the county board on January 9, showing them the original ballot request forms and envelopes and implying that the facility’s employees signed them for the residents, a fact disputed by the employees who testified during the hearing. In other cases, Miles said, employees didn’t properly sign their names as assistants to the person voting.
“They may be technicalities in some sense, but at the same time, when we’re talking about the integrity of the voting system, they’re important things to consider,” Miles said.
Takesha Gilchrist, the director of Red Springs Assisted Living, testified that she and her staff won’t help residents vote in future elections after undergoing the investigation.
Gilchrist and Kayla Rodriguez, the facility’s activities director, said residents are now hesitant to vote.
“They wanted to know whether they were trying to take their right to vote, whether they were not going to be able to vote again because of where they were,” Rodriguez said.
Kenya Myers, program manager for Disability Rights North Carolina, investigated the case and questioned the facility’s residents. She wrote in an affidavit to the county board that she was concerned “about the chilling effect of continued pursuit of voters with disabilities” and the people who care for them.
“What’s happened at this one facility is that people are becoming literally disenfranchised based on their own fear and based on the fact that facility staff have a felony being held over their heads,” Lisa Grafstein, Disability Rights North Carolina’s litigation counsel, said during the hearing.
Gretchen Lutz, chair of the county elections board, said the board needs to deploy enough multipartisan assistance teams (MAT), which are trained to help voters fill out their ballots, to meet demand.
Gilchrist said she called the county board twice ahead of last November’s election to request a team to help the facility’s residents vote. But the teams were short-staffed, said Jessica Davis, director of the Robeson County Board of Elections.
County election boards across the state will begin mailing absentee ballots this week for the March primary.
With 30 assisted living and other residential care facilities in Robeson County, Lutz suggested training volunteers to serve on the assistance teams so that a case like this doesn’t happen again.
“What we don’t want is every time there’s an election that’s close, somebody looks around at some facility where they might be able to go disqualify some people because they don’t remember what happened, or because somebody who was just trying to help them filled out the wrong line on a form,” Grafstein said.